Reuse One Frequency Planning for Two-hop Cellular System with Fixed Relay Nodes

This paper investigates the issue of frequency planning for cellular systems enhanced with two-hop fixed relay nodes (FRNs) under the assumption of frequency reuse one. A channel dependent intra-cell spectrum partitioning solution is proposed. According to this solution, the mean values of the signal-to-interference-ratio on respective sets of links are taken into account to determine the bandwidths assigned to base station (BS)-FRN links, FRN-mobile terminal (MT) links and BS-MT links. Moreover, by combining above intra-cell spectrum partitioning solution with different inter-cell interference management approaches, we propose three concrete frequency planning schemes, i.e. the cell-partitioning based scheme, the virtual-sector based scheme and the virtual sector enhanced cell-partitioning based scheme. It is shown through computer simulations that the FRN enhanced cellular systems with proposed frequency planning schemes can remarkably outperform conventional cellular systems when FRNs are communicating with BS over line-of-sight (LOS) links. The proper positioning of FRNs and the impacts of the reliability on the BS-FRN links are addressed as well.